Khon Kaen, Thailand/ October 19, 2022 – Members of the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) countries, development practitioners, government and intergovernmental organizations, stakeholders, non-government and civil society, private and non-profit development organizations, research institutes, and academia are attending a hybrid Mekong Forum 2022 on 19 October. Under the theme “Accelerating Post COVID-19 Recovery and Building Resilience in the Greater Mekong Subregion”, the event highlights the importance of increasing long-term resilience and building back better, discusses priority issues of the GMS and serves as regional exchange platform for collecting lessons-learned, positive stories and best practices to accelerate post COVID-19 recovery and build resilience.  

Dr. Narongchai Akrasanee, Chairman of MI Steering Committee, invited the audience to reflect on the Covid-19 pandemic in his keynote address: “In the last two years, MI, just like all of us, struggled to survive and stay relevant. Now into the last quarter of 2022, we have survived the pandemic. The question is how best to recover? How best to build stronger resilience from a disaster that affects the labor factor or human resources, their inputs into the workplace and their movement for production and consumption? The long period of the Covid Pandemic has also had severe effects on the macro economy of us all.”

To provide answers to the questions, he said: “The recovery after the Covid pandemic must focus on the people, their ability to return to work, and reconnect for commercial and personal purposes. In the long-term, measures must be created and organized so that the people will not suffer from another pandemic so severely and for so long. Because our GMS economies are very much integrated by the movement of the workforce, and of goods and services, we must bring them back to that movement and further enhance it. We have learned from the pandemic that the world will always need to meet the basic human needs, i.e., food. Therefore, our GMS with its excellent water and land resources, is good for this sector and we should make it even better.”

In his keynote address, Mr. Ramesh Subramaniam, Director General, Southeast Asia Department (SERD), Asian Development Bank (ADB), Metro Manila, Philippines, stated: “The Asian Development Bank is working closely with our member countries to face the challenges of post-pandemic recovery. Our emphasis is on supporting resilient economic growth and green infrastructure development. As the secretariat of the GMS economic cooperation program, ADB is also supporting the GMS countries in achieving these targets and overcoming the challenges they face.”